Tag: disk drive speed

Almost all of the new PCs that have been bought in the past couple of years should ideally have SATA HDDs (Serial-ATA Hard Disk Drives) in them. If you have a Windows Vista system with a SATA HDD, then you should know that you can optimize it to run faster. The following steps will let you hack into the Vista system and tweak the configurations so that your SATA HDD works with a faster speed and gives a better performance.

Login to your Vista PC using an Adminitrator account.

Open the Device Manager. [For this you have to simply go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance, and then click on the Device Manager tab.]

Find the SATA HDD installed on your system under the Disk drives tree-branch.

Select Properties for the HDD by either double-clicking on it or right-clicking and then selecting Properties in the context menu.

Go to the Policies tab.

Select (tick) the check-box for Enable advanced performance option nested below the Enable write caching on the disk option. [Note: In case the Optimize for quick removal is selected instead of the Optimize for performance option, then you will have to deselct it, and tick the check-box next to the Optimize for performance option first.]

Press OK.

Exit the Device Manager.

A point to note is that the Enable advanced performance option in Step 6 is available only for a SATA hard disk and is grayed out if it is any other type of a hard disk (such as an IDE or a PATA).